Elizabeth tells me Jannis Kounellis is dead. I already knew that, obviously. It demoted Putin and Trump to the second page of the National Enquirer. She wanted me to write a blog. Coz, you see, I like death. And Kounellis, who was alive, now isn’t. But I don’t really like death that much, and even though I’ve only met him twice, and haven’t seen him for years, I would prefer him to be alive.

Untitled, 1991–2011, Jannis KounellisImage: Mona/Rémi Chauvin

He came to Mona, and he put a knife and a couple of goldfish in a bowl. People complain incessantly about that. Because the only reason that we should torture animals is for food. Entertainment, or social commentary, or art—that’s just indulgent. Our goldfish go home to a bigger tank, but that isn’t good enough. Our fish atrocity would only be appropriate if we ate them. There is no other way, as we all know, to get calories. No one has ever survived longer than six seconds without eating meat. Did you know that six seconds is the attention span of a floret of broccoli?

Untitled, 1998, Jannis KounellisImage: Mona/Leigh Carmichael

Kounellis also ruthlessly sacrificed lassos to the temple of art. The aesthetics are irreproachable, and we rarely take that work down. Elizabeth said that work, and the fish and the knife, are free of the ravages of metaphor. Knife constrains fish, rope restrains bull, art maintains ethics. Except when art persecutes goldfish.

Untitled, 1998, Jannis KounellisImage: Mona/Rémi Chauvin

Or meat. Occasionally, when perverse whim pervades, loops of rope are replaced by sides of beef. Few moral issues here. The meat was made to be murdered. A few sides of beef among the millions bred to be cooked medium rare. But hung on the Mona wall carpaccio. Just to show our sophistication.

Kounellis is dead. But he is so recently dead he is still meat. If his body, his corpse, the meat of him, were here, I would hang him from a hook. But it wouldn’t be him, it would be a metaphor for him: his art, his life, his greasy greatness.

There on the hook, not wriggling, not creating. There would be all that remains of a man, an artist, a husband, an adopted Italian, a Greek denier, who taught me to look beyond the superficial. He helped me to see the links in the chain that bind us to iniquity, but are all the more stifling because of their invisibility.

Eat your meat. Dine on Jannis Kounellis’s corpse. But be sure to free the goldfish.

In the Macquarie Point vision, David Walsh and Leigh Carmichael have started, among other things, a conversation about how a public space might appropriately refer to the history of Tasmanian Aboriginals, and the relationship of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The Mayor of Hobart recently said, after some back and forth, that she would ‘welcome the precinct being renamed to an Aboriginal name, with a sentiment such as “walking together,” recognising that we are all Tasmanians walking together on a path toward the future.’

That’s a beautiful vision, yes? I bet the Mayor wishes she’d said that first.

Fifteen years ago I resigned my lucrative law partnership in Vancouver, sold my house, kissed my sweetie goodbye, and moved to Nunavut, Canada’s newest territory, the Inuit (Eskimo) homeland, genuinely excited by the prospect of working with legislation and a justice system that Inuit themselves were building within the framework of Canadian law, in their own state. Let me tell you what I’ve learned.

I was welcomed in Nunavut. Nobody could doubt my good faith; nobody did. But regularly—sometimes daily—I said things that, although they made perfect and uncontroversial sense to me, caused my listeners to wince, and furtively look at each other wondering how to tell me just how totally fucking wrong, stupid and offensive I had just been. And whether they took me on front and centre, or remained silent, or something in-between, I never felt good about it. I had to learn a new way of talking. I had to learn a new way of listening. I still make people wince, sometimes. I’m still learning.

Pronouns, for example. The politically-correct obsession with pronouns can seem absurdly pedantic. After all, once you’ve mentioned any group by name, ‘they’ is the grammatically correct short form.

But that is not the end of what ‘they’ means. Forgive me for stating the obvious: ‘they’ is not ‘I’ or ‘we’ or ‘you.’ In social terms, ‘them’ is the opposite of ‘us.’ It’s hard on anybody to hear themselves constantly referred to in the third person, neither addressed directly nor implicitly included in the speakers’ point of view. It’s excluding, diminishing.

One of the things the Mayor first said was, ‘Whether they want this to be a shrine, [or] equally if it’s just a place where they can explain their culture and show off some of the things that they do that are very significant to them, well I’d be very supportive of that.’

Out of forty-three words, five are ‘them’ or ‘they.’ Every eighth word or so reinforces the message that Aboriginals are Other.

I repeat: I have myself written sentences this offensive. And then I revise them: ‘If this is to be a shrine, or a place celebrating and exploring Aboriginal culture, well I’d be very supportive of that.’

I’m not saying the rewrite would meet with agreement all around. Taking out the othering effect of the third person and changing ‘show off’ to ‘celebrate’ doesn’t render agreement on the function of the place. It just lets the conversation move forward more easily.

Every time I realise I’ve done something like this—and yes, I still do—I get angry, defensive. It means the same thing! Fucking pronouns! Why does this have to be so picky! We all know I mean well! I climb down gracelessly, blushing… because it doesn’t mean the same thing. It really doesn’t. What makes me so damn uncomfortable is that I have to recognise the difference comes from something in me, something that isolates a group of people who are very different from me, and makes assumptions about ‘them.’ ‘I am not racist!’ I scream inside.

But there it is: like it or not, I occasionally default to assumptions that I have consciously rejected, that I have worked hard to overcome not just in myself, but in laws, institutions and infrastructure design.

No doubt there is survival value in distrusting the stranger; we seem to be hardwired for it. And distrusting someone who has a legitimate grievance against our ancestors… definitely not irrational. But not always useful.

We tend to dehumanise strangers, the people we do not know. The first humanity denied is complexity, individuality. ‘They all look the same.’ We expect a group of strangers to share a worldview and speak with one voice, as though the trait by which we identify them, the difference (Aboriginal, immigrant, gay, whatever) determines their whole being. This just does not work. Defining any person—much less a whole bunch of people—in terms of a grudge I assume they hold against me or my ancestors, for example, is inevitably going to be a huge mischaracterisation.

All of us—all colours, all labels—have to get past our xenophobic assumptions and habits of speech if we are to make things better, and the only way I know is to keep trying. Because every time I rewrite a bad sentence (or, even more embarrassing, have to correct myself in front of live people in real time) it rewires my brain a little bit. It’s humbling.

After fifteen years of this process, I read a sentence like:

‘It’s a place where we just simply acknowledge a tragedy that happened two hundred years ago,’

and I hear:

‘Okay, okay, we acknowledge that a tragedy happened two hundred years ago. Briefly. Simply. And that’s one tragedy, not multiple tragedies; don’t make this complicated. And it was two hundred years ago. Nothing since then, no Aboriginal tragedy since then. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. I have my fingers in my ears. La la la, lalalalalala.’

(I’m not saying that’s how it would sound to any Tasmanian, Aboriginal or not. I don’t know.)

Now when I read,

‘Whatever happened two hundred years ago is really, really sad, but lots of atrocities have happened. People came away here in ships, torn away from their families for stealing a turnip,’

I note that although we are supposedly discussing an acknowledgment of Aboriginal people, only the non-Aboriginals get called ‘people,’ and have families, even turnips! The embedded message is that the acknowledgement of non-Aboriginal tragedy need not be simple, and is an appropriate topic—even in an exhortation to keep the acknowledgement of Aboriginal tragedy simple.

I repeat: I have used words that way, thoughtlessly, tone-deaf. Of course the Mayor knows and believes that Aboriginals are people. Thoughtless, tone-deaf comments do not mean the speaker is racist.

When policy is intentionally built on xenophobic assumptions around race, when somebody actively advocates that approach to policy making—that’s racist. My assessment is that most old (and some new) legislation and institutions in Canada include xenophobic assumptions about aboriginals. The most adverse impacts are in infrastructure policy and planning, which can crucially affect quality of life. I’d bet that’s true in Australia, too, because of the giant-sized geography and colonial history. What I know from experience is that those assumptions have to be opened up and aired for the policy or institution to change in any meaningful way.

A conversation about race and colonialism is never going to be completely easy or comfortable. But as we partake, we evolve; and as we come to know each other better, distrust abates. Nobody held my stupid comments against me, once I saw how stupid they were. I usually didn’t even have to apologise. Something along the lines of ‘D’oh!’ or ‘uh… that came out wrong’ tended to suffice. Nobody held my ancestors against me, ever.

Although this conversation often provokes anger, anguish, guilt, embarrassment and frustration, those feelings are incidental to the conversation, not its substance or essence. Yeah, guilt happens sometimes, when I realise what privilege I have, and how I have taken it for granted, but usually it’s more like sadness. All of us discussing these fraught issues, Inuit and non, struggle with emotion sometimes. Emotion has to be acknowledged, even honoured. It abates, if not resisted or denied, and then we can get back to the agenda. Of course, we don’t always manage that process as gracefully as we could wish; we’re human. To quote Samuel Beckett, ‘No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Sometimes after a bit of a break.

And although the conversation about race, resources and colonialism must involve some consideration of our conflicted past, the past is not ultimately what is most important. What’s important is who we are now, in all our complications, and what we do now and for the future.

I can point to good policy and programs Nunavut has designed through these conversations; that makes the whole damn thing worthwhile for me. When one of those good things is taken up across Canada, to our national benefit, I know it’s worthwhile for all of us. I grossly underestimated how much work there was to be done fifteen years ago. But I am at least as optimistic now as I was then, because I know it can be done, and I know how: by speaking carefully, listening respectfully, honouring the silences. By allowing for the possibility that conversation can change our minds, where all change starts. It is conversation—that difficult, uncomfortable, illuminating conversation—that builds the path on which we walk together toward the future.

It’s such a funny, awkward feeling
Death’s hollow charisma.
Most captured moments
Are stretched on a canvas of forever.
And then a little trigger
Just now the mother of the Brady Bunch.
A mental triangulation
Forty-five years ago in black and white
That alone – just that one datum –
that means I’m more than halfway there.
An awkward unstructured poetic band aid later
Scab removed
Here I am.

Later, at 4.10am, her name comes to me unbidden – Shirley Jones. I feel strangely placated by my memory. I didn’t like her on TV, but now her death and my poem make us kindred sufferers of the real. So I look her up. But Shirley Jones wasn’t the matriarch of The Brady Bunch – she was the mum on The Partridge Family. And in the world of nearlies – coincidences that seem to be imbued with deeper meaning (but aren’t) – I discover Shirley was offered The Brady Bunch role, but turned it down. That, for her, is a good thing. The Partridge Family was a much better show than The Brady Bunch. In my head Shirley Jones was dead. Now, she isn’t dead. Next time I think of her, she will probably be dead, again.

Just another day later: a real death. Of course, any flame extinguished is singed by sorrow, but the demise of Florence Henderson (the actual Brady Bunch lady) meant little to me except as a marker of my mortality. Fidel Castro’s death isn’t about death (except in the sense of Ozymandias). It’s about the sway of politics in the thrall of personality. One person can make a difference, but when one does, the difference is rarely irreproachable. Utopian ideals immiserate populations, because utopian visions are driven by an individual’s beliefs, and most personal beliefs have little merit. Untested ideas and ideals usually don’t work, and a country isn’t the best experimental subject. That’s not the main problem, though. Individuals tend to appraise their skills too highly due to a cognitive bias called illusory superiority (also wonderfully called the Lake Wobegon effect, after a fictional town in which all the kids are above average). That’s not the main problem, either. The big issue reveals itself when circumstances (or birth right) contrive to make you king, or president, or even president for life, and it starts to look like your illusory superiority isn’t illusory (to you and, often, your subjects). Robert Trivers, who, but for my own ignorance, would have been one of the curators in Mona’s big show, On the Origin of Art, wrote:

When a feeling of power is induced in people, they are less likely to take others’ viewpoint and more likely to centre their thinking on themselves.

That’s Ozymandias, that’s Trump, and though he had a bit more character, that’s Castro.

Despite the fact that Castro’s brand of socialism appears to lack moral probity, I am a little saddened to see another form of social organisation bite the bullet. Nature needs diversity, and we need competing social systems. There aren’t many polities where democracy is undimmed. Churchill said, ‘Democracy is the worst form of Government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ Nevertheless, we seem to have all our eggs in the one basket case.

In the gallery at Mona, there is an exhibition-experiment taking place, called Hound in the Hunt. Read more about it here, and also – for the enthusiastic – watch the documentary Tim’s Vermeer, and get your hands on our big, beautiful book as well (online, in our bookshop, or in the library, for free).

The following is a conversation between David Walsh and Tim Jenison about Vermeer, Viagra, and the nature of genius. (Interviewed by Elizabeth Pearce, with a cameo appearance by Mona curator Jarrod Rawlins.)

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Elizabeth Pearce: David, in the exhibition catalogue for Hound in the Hunt, you write that even if you don’t give a shit about art you should watch Tim’s Vermeer, because it will teach you how to learn. What did you learn about learning from watching Tim’s Vermeer?

David Walsh: Tim’s process uses all the ways that you’ve got of acquiring knowledge. There’s induction – where you start with a fact and you build on it. He also uses lateral processes, and reductionism. I really like the way he thinks. He does things in a way that is structured to accrue knowledge faster than almost any other individual that I’ve encountered. In other words, I think he’s really fucking smart.

EP: Tim, were you attempting to adopt a scientific methodology when you made Tim’s Vermeer, or is that just the way you think?

Tim Jenison: It’s the way I think. I don’t seem to be any smarter than anyone else, but I was always a logical kid, growing up. My dad was an engineer and he would always talk technical to me, just assuming that I could understand everything that he was talking about. He had a really deep respect for rational thought.

EP: David, is this an exhibition about how to learn? Is that the most important thing?

DW: No. The subject matter is interesting to me, and obviously it is to Tim. But if he thought purely in a technical way, in the way he is describing, I don’t think he would have got anywhere with this project. The hardest thing to discover is the thing that, immediately after it’s discovered, everyone thinks is bleeding obvious. This comparator mirror device is one of those things. So I sit back and think, ‘Okay, it works. There’s no way it wasn’t discovered by Vermeer and others. And then I think, ‘But I’m assuming it was discovered because it seems so bloody obvious – but it wasn’t obvious to anyone else before Tim found it, discovered it, rediscovered it, whatever.’ But of course there aren’t a lot of people thinking about how to reproduce the great masters now. We tend to think that we’re smarter than people have been in the past and of course we’re not. If you’re trying to build a pyramid and you have ten thousand people sitting around for two or three hundred years, they’ll think of things that we didn’t. It is my contention that, even though it’s an obvious process, it was really hard to discover – but somebody did. And I would further contend that there are a whole bunch of ways of doing this [painting using mirrors] that Tim hasn’t thought of, and neither has anyone else, except someone in Holland or Italy or Spain hundreds of years ago. So yeah, it’s difficult to draw a conclusion about whether Tim’s right – which has nothing to do with the question, I think. Even though his process could have achieved what Vermeer achieved, it might not be the only way to do it. In fact, listening to [art historian] Roberta Lapucci, I see some ideas that might even be an improvement on Tim’s method, although the end point of her technology doesn’t interest me that much.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

EP: I’m going to come back to that in a minute but I just want to isolate exactly what it is you are trying to learn. I think that it’s easy to misunderstand this project as being about, ‘Does this painting look like Vermeer’s painting?’ You’re not trying to say conclusively ‘yes, Vermeer and the other painters definitely did use this device.’ It’s more about, ‘Does the device work? Is it possible to use this device to accurately reproduce a live scene?’

TJ: Yes. It doesn’t look to me like there’s a way to prove that Vermeer used this device without additional information. But I think that Vermeer unintentionally left earmarks of a measurement process – because that’s what the comparator mirror is. It’s a measurement process. Our eyes are not good at measurement, especially in brightness. They’re a little better in dimension, but in brightness, our eyes are constantly distorting what we see. The brightness that you see at any point is based on the points around it. So that’s what I thought I saw in Vermeer’s pictures. Jonathan Janson and I argue about this. Janson, I think, slightly misunderstands my take on this. He says ‘People didn’t care about absolute brightness. Why would Vermeer do that?’ and I would agree, they don’t care. Our eyes don’t care. Our eyes are perfectly happy looking at the photographs that have a totally different brightness range than reality. But I think there are side effects of this process that look like they show up in Vermeer and some other painters – not that many, just a few. David Hockney got in trouble for implying that all the great masters of the late Renaissance were cheating. That’s a strong argument. He wasn’t really saying that, but he did think the use of optics was pretty widespread. I’m focusing just on Vermeer because that’s where I saw this effect [of absolute brightness] the strongest, but there are other artists that produce the same feeling. Janson says it’s just a hunch, that I am reacting emotionally to Vermeer’s verisimilitude, and projecting my own photographic sense on it, interpreting it as photographic. But I think it’s there. I’m not sure if I can measure it.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

EP: In your catalogue essay you lay out your reasons for believing that Vermeer used absolute tonal accuracy. What Jonathan Janson says is that you base your whole argument on the fact that you believe that Vermeer paintings achieve that objectivity – but Vermeer did not paint objectively. He interpreted reality in a fantastic way. Do you see any merit to that criticism?

TJ: It’s an old argument – it goes back before Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge. Philip Steadman calls it mimetophobia – the fear of exact copying, that an artist doesn’t do that, that art is not a picture of reality. As Hockney points out, even if you’re using an optical process, it’s work done by hand, and you can’t get around that. It’s a work of art. I have gone farther than Hockney. I have said you can, essentially, paint an accurate photograph. Hockney couldn’t find a way to do that. Hockney said, ‘I tried painting on the camera obscura image and I gave up after ten minutes, and everyone would.’ Generally speaking that’s true. It seems like it should work but it doesn’t. But I would never claim that Vermeer was taking snapshots and that they’re haphazard and that they were somehow not composed. They are beautiful pictures and my argument doesn’t change that, it’s just how you go about it.

EP: It’s not that you’re saying, ‘Look at my painting, look at my Vermeer. That’s as good as his Vermeer. Therefore my device must have been used.’ It’s more that you’re saying, ‘If this is what I can produce, someone with no experience or training, imagine what someone of Vermeer’s obvious talent could do’?

TJ: Right. That’s the gist of my argument – that the comparator mirror works. It is a way to paint with a camera obscura that nobody previously had thought possible.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

DW: Actually it’s not clear Vermeer had talent.

TJ: Hmm?

DW: In my opinion it’s not clear he had talent. Other artists who probably used optics, like Caravaggio, actually painted. One of the things that’s emerging in this experiment already is that everyone who has a go, particularly people who have artistic experience, use the comparator mirror in a completely different way. You sit them down, you tell them how to use it, they start drawing. The drawing takes on the characteristic of the objects but it also takes on a sheen of the artist, right? Everyone does that, with the exception of Vermeer.

TJ: I am shocked at the variety of drawings that have come out of the hands-on table at Mona. Not one of them really resembles another one very strongly.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

EP: So what does that tell us?

TJ: As it pertains to Vermeer, it tells you that there was some spark in Vermeer that is responsible for the look of his paintings. It’s not just the optical process.

DW: I think it’s in the exact negative of that. I think that Caravaggio, for example, adds a sheen of his own expertise. Titian, if he uses a similar process, [Georges] de La Tour, and so on. Vermeer is the negative of that. He adds nothing. That to me is what characterises his work and why it’s most identifiably optical.

TJ: He does stick to the knitting, I think, if he used the comparator, more than most, more than de La Tour did, for example.

DW: The only way you can do it more than he did it is if you have no artistic experience at all, so that the comparator mirror is the only guide you have – as was the case when you painted The Music Lesson. So I think the default hypothesis is now that of the artists that used it, Vermeer was the most inexperienced.

TJ: I would maybe have to agree with you because I had no experience and I stuck to the knitting. That was my rule that I made for myself. ‘I’m going to paint, as precisely as possible, exactly what I see at the edge of the mirror. I’m going to copy that.’ I knew that I was painting differently than Vermeer but Vermeer didn’t always do what I did and he changed his painterliness often. He would abstract things. He would paint big areas of colour that are obviously not areas of colour in reality.

DW: Absolutely and that’s what emerges from people with a little bit of experience immediately. Possibly the two reasons that it worked for you is one, you didn’t know anything about painting, and two, you had decided to follow the process. Caravaggio can produce a large work in a couple of days – there’s some evidence for this. Vermeer – well, if he could, he didn’t, because he didn’t produce many works. I think there are a lot of flagstones on the path to suggesting that he wasn’t particularly experienced. We know that the Dutch had an apprenticeship-type process where you studied with a master and there’s documentation about who they studied with. We don’t know anything about Vermeer, do we?

TJ: No, we don’t, but it’s not unusual to have that lack in a Dutch artist.

DW: Give me an example.

TJ: I would say – and I haven’t really delved into this deeply – in less than maybe half the cases, the identity of the master is documented. There were scores and scores, hundreds of Dutch artists. This is a time in history, the seventeenth century, when something like five million pictures were produced in Holland. Everyone had a picture on their wall. This includes etchings and things like that.

DW: Everyone had a camera on their phone.

TJ: So a lot of people like to point out that Vermeer must have had a master and he must have studied for six years because that was the rules of the Guild of Saint Luke, and you couldn’t sign a painting, you couldn’t sell a painting, unless you belonged to the Guild. I did find kind of a loophole in the Guild regulations in that if you showed up with a masterpiece that you had painted, it was at their discretion to allow you to join without proof of your apprenticeship. In my alternate history Vermeer shows up with maybe Girl with a Red Hat or one of his early pictures and says, ‘I’ve painted this’ and they go, ‘Okay, you’re good enough to be in, without the six-year requirement.’

DW: Is it established that the loophole has been used?

TJ: No, but it’s in there in the Guild rules, as they were in the seventeenth century. It says that. It was mostly used for foreigners coming into the area, where they couldn’t really prove their apprenticeship. So then it was just down to how well can they paint, and can they pay their dues? That was important.

EP: For this experiment, based on what you’ve learned so far, would you considering altering the terms to use painters that don’t have any experience or training?

TJ: Sure. Caravaggio – we know he had training but from what we know, which is a lot more than about Vermeer, he was painting for his master, flowers and still lifes and things like that. He struggled. He wanted to paint portraits but he wasn’t at that point in his apprenticeship. We don’t really have any of his earliest works but they were pots of flowers probably. His style emerges out of whole cloth, just from nothing. It’s pretty much there from the start, from his first pictures, like Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Some of his earliest pictures have the same look as his late work. It turned Italian art upside down, because look – you either hated him or you loved him. One of his biographers was a painter, Bellori, who hated him. He said, ‘This guy’s painting naturally. He’s painting the way reality really looks, and you shouldn’t do that.’ He criticised him because he couldn’t paint without a subject right in front of him. He couldn’t invent a picture like you were meant to do as an artist. Caravaggio painted basically in secret. He didn’t like people to watch him. There’re a lot of strange things about Caravaggio. We know he owned mirrors, several mirrors, including a curved one – and he was a crazy man. Well, it was a violent time, but he was a very violent man.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

DW: Which Lapucci put down to mercury poisoning.

TJ: Yeah, they called it ‘painter’s colic’, from all these chemicals that they were around – arsenic, mercury, lead. All these things build up in your system and make you crazy. The treatment, by the way, for painter’s colic, was alcohol. Mass quantities of alcohol would take the edge off it.

DW: I think you answered the wrong question.

EP: I meant – for this experiment at Mona, you got trained painters. Would you consider changing it in light of what you’ve learned, to use less experienced painters?

TJ: I see. I misunderstood the question. Tim’s Vermeer showed one guy, me, painting one painting, by one painter, Vermeer, and as such it’s just a first step. People said, ‘Okay, that’s interesting, but what does it mean in a more general sense?’ So when David asked me to do more experiments I thought that was one of the things we should look at. ‘What happens when people that can really paint use this?’ And I’ve got to say up to this point it’s early in the process. I’m surprised. After a week or two I figured out that I had to exactly copy what I saw in the mirror and that’s where I got the realism I was after. These painters that have been practising now for several months, they have an incredible amount of difficulty doing that. My friend Graham is a painter and I had him try it. He hated it and still hates it. He allows that it is very effective and it allows him to paint like Caravaggio, which he would otherwise not be able to do. But, for example, Graham sat down with a brush, and we had a live model – Carlo. Graham started looking in the mirror and then he would just sort of lean to the side and just start to paint. He started, he got the eye in the right place – but then that was it. He was off. I stood back and I said, ‘Graham, in the mirror I don’t see the bags under Carlo’s eyes. I don’t see that, but you’ve painted it?’ He says, ‘Well, they’re there’ and I said, ‘Yeah, but you can’t see them in the mirror, in these lighting conditions at least.’ It took two or three, maybe four portraits before I could get him to do it.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

EP: Was that about that revulsion for absolute verisimilitude, the idea that if you’re an artist then you should be interpreting reality as opposed to slavishly replicating it?

TJ: I don’t think that’s it. That wasn’t the case in Graham’s experiment. Strangely enough it seems to be much easier for artists to do still lifes [using the comparator mirror] than a face. They just refuse to paint a deep shadow on a face. They know what colour flesh is. They know how to paint portraits. The mirror says, ‘Okay, this half of the face is in deep shadow’ because that’s how I set it up, and they just won’t do it. I will point it out to them and they’ll go, ‘No, that’s the colour.’ Sometimes I’ll use my smart phone and take a picture through the mirror. Then you can see clearly that there’s black, white – it’s just like night and day. But there is a part of our brain that interprets human faces – the amygdala, I guess. I don’t know how that relates to brightness sensation, but it’s almost like a different pathway when they paint faces. They don’t want to do it.

DW: That’s what we learn from prosopagnosia, a condition where you lose your ability to recognise faces. That ability is an algorithmic component of the brain that’s separate from other visual processes.

I’m going to push this point. What we’ve done is get a bunch of experienced artists to use Tim’s device, and we’ve learned something, which is that they all paint differently. We need a control experiment, which is to get a whole bunch of artists who’ve had the experience which you’ve had, which is very little, and see if they all paint like you, because I think that that would be evidence that Vermeer was at the early stage rather than the late stage of his experience as an artist.

TJ: My prediction would be that they would not paint just like me.

EP: You’re talking about controlling different variables. Do you see this as meeting a scientific standard of enquiry?

DW: No. Science has to have knowledge emerge cumulatively, as Sister Wendy put it, like rungs on a ladder. It has to work, despite the fact that sixty-five per cent of scientific papers contain fraud in them. It has to work, despite the fact that almost no one knows anything themselves personally, because of their own biases. And it does. But insights come from a whole range of ways of looking at the world, and they’re the sort of things that I was talking about when I said Tim was smart. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a better accumulator of knowledge than some others. It just means that he has more angles. We have produced a text [the exhibition catalogue], and that text does not read like a scientific document. We’ve got two acts of advocacy, one from Tim and one from Jonathan. They’re both saying, ‘Look, here’s what I believe.’ We have no way of coming out at the other end with, ‘Hypothesis A is falsified’ – where hypothesis A is ‘Vermeer used optical apparatus’. I mean apparatus beyond a camera obscura, which is pretty well established I would think.

TJ: It’s not documented that he used a camera obscura.

DW: For the sake of the argument both you and Jonathan are assuming it is?

TJ: No. I like to not assume that. I think it’s likely.

DW: But Jonathan is assuming it.

TJ: He is, yes.

DW: And the way you’ve set up the experiment includes the camera obscura.

TJ: Yeah, but it’s not building on a known fact. It’s another hypothesis.

DW: Yes, but it doesn’t seem we addressed it in our experiment very much.

TJ: No. And our experiment here is more like – Jonathan’s two paintings will be, as I see it, two demonstrations of two different techniques. It’s not supposed to be scientific.

DW: Hopefully, knowledge… Well, let’s not call it ‘knowledge’. Hopefully, some ideas will emerge. It’s unlikely, but possible, that something will emerge that makes it testable.

TJ: It would be cool if it did.

EP: Even just loosening the constraints of how you can think about art history is already a valuable contribution to make, in terms of showing that you are allowed to challenge received wisdom.

TJ: When I read art history it doesn’t read like science to me. It’s a very quirky field to me, from the outside looking in. It’s pretty homogenous even though there are wide-ranging aspects of it that come from totally different points of view. Modern art history is really only one hundred years old. In Vermeer’s time there were no art historians. They didn’t write about art. What they wrote about it was maybe half a paragraph about a painting. Jonathan, I think, kind of resents this intrusion. Maybe I’m projecting on Jonathan, but a lot of art historians – for example, with David Hockney, they just said, ‘Stand back Mr Hockney. I can’t see Vermeer from where I am.’ Susan Sontag said, ‘You’re implying that the great lovers of history were taking Viagra. They were cheating.’

DW: Taking Viagra is now cheating?

TJ: Yes, it is, absolutely, according to Sontag.

EP: Let’s come back to that in a minute. I know exactly where David’s mind’s going. Just hold onto that thought for a second. So these are the dominant strands of criticism from the art historical point of view?

TJ: Yeah. Particularly in Vermeer’s case, Walter Liedtke and Arthur Wheelock have written a lot on Vermeer and they, at most, would go with the ‘weak optical theory’ – that Vermeer may have seen a camera obscura projection and been inspired by it but not actually used it [read more about ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ optical theories in the exhibition catalogue].

EP: But the main objections to your project – are they represented by what Jonathan Janson says in his essay?

TJ: Yeah, this mimetophobia particularly. Jonathan thinks that Vermeer was a towering genius, that he understood light in a way no one else did, understood painting as a result of this apprentice system, and also due to his incredible intelligence and talent. He might be right. That’s of course what we’re all taught in art history. So Hockney’s argument, and my thesis, which goes even farther – they don’t like that. It’s an intrusion.

EP: We are talking about the production of knowledge and the way that our own biases can contaminate knowledge. You said – famously now, within these walls – that you have ‘no dog in this hunt’. Do you really think that’s true?

TJ: No. I certainly want to be right and everyone wants to be liked…

DW: Which one would you pick? I’m pretty sure you can only have one.

TJ: I would rather be right.

EP: I’d rather be liked.

DW: It’s possible to be neither.

EP: True.

TJ: Yeah, so I’m probably neither. But what I meant by that comment was that I’m not a professional artist, art historian or art theorist, and I have no financial stake in it or academic stake in it. I am an outsider.

EP: David, what’s your dog in the hunt?

DW: Listen, I read Hockney’s book a few years ago. It didn’t cause me to form an opinion. I talked to [former Mona Director] Mark Fraser about it. Mark’s a smart art guy. He said the book was crap. Mark now doesn’t think it’s crap but he did then. So I thought, ‘Okay, it’s probably crap.’ He’s the only expert I know – or the only one who doesn’t have his own dog in the hunt. If Jonathan is going to learn to paint like Vermeer in ten minutes after forty years of failure, he’s going to be pretty shitty at the world. He would be so barking up the wrong tree that it would really, really piss him off.

So, me. Two years ago I formed an opinion. I watched Tim’s documentary. I read a few books and I started to think, ‘Yeah, that’s the way history is.’ The comparator mirror is pragmatic. It uses all available resources. At that point I was thinking, ‘This is so simple, it must have been discovered many times’, but I’ve rethought about that, and – I wouldn’t say it’s ingenious, but it’s quite lateral, and it’s possible that it wasn’t discovered. But I’m actually talking about why I believe it. I should answer your question. Your question is, do I have a dog in the hunt, and the answer is yes, but I’m nowhere near as committed as Tim or Jonathan.

EP: Do you now feel convinced enough that you would like it to be true?

DW: Well, it would fuck Jonathan’s life if it were true. Tim has got quite a bit invested in it. He’s had a movie made, had a whole bunch of people see it. He’s written a catalogue essay – more effort. He cannot avoid being very thoroughly invested. But because of the nature of our biology he can be quite unaware that he’s thoroughly invested in it. His status now depends on it. And for the most part new ideas only displace old ideas when everyone dies. Then they just move on from the old idea. Stephen Jay Gould talked more shit than almost anyone on earth and he had to die before he stopped polluting the biological environment – I mean the biological theoretical environment, as opposed to literally shitting in the river.

EP: Justification for an intellectual assassination.

DW: The trouble is, if you started knocking off all the morons, you’ll occasionally knock off the fringe dweller that’s right. Basically you need the crazies because every now and then a crazy is right. You need crazies – but also an apparatus to determine that they’re crazy.

EP: There are also other problems with killing people for their beliefs, but other than that, yes. In that sense – Tim, you’re obviously putting yourself on the line. But Jonathan is being very brave in what he’s doing. Taking part in this experiment is actually an incredibly brave thing to do.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

TJ: I like Jonathan. Jonathan is open-minded.

DW: He doesn’t like you.

TJ: I don’t care. He’s more open-minded than most people in this debate. When I first started talking to him about it he just didn’t understand my technical points. I said, ‘You should come to San Antonio and try this’ and he did. He spent two weeks there.

DW: Compared to another guy who wouldn’t even watch the movie.

TJ: Another guy, whose name – Arthur Wheelock – will not be mentioned, refused to watch the film, apparently, according to a mutual friend of a friend.

DW: That’s an hour and a half of his time. He can’t afford that. When he knows without question that the hypothesis is nonsense, why waste and hour and a half? Makes sense to me, but I’d still punch him.

TJ: So Jonathan came and he tried and he came loaded for bear, as we say in Texas. He had his arguments lined up and mostly his strongest objection was about underpainting – that the Dutch would start with what they called dead painting, typically a brown and white image. Then they would work it up in colours. I had not done that in Tim’s Vermeer. I had done it in a previous experiment that was not in the film. I told Jonathan, ‘I don’t see there’s a problem here…’

EP: But isn’t that anathema to what you were testing? You were saying that the painters were possibly using a completely different technique.

TJ: It turns out that underpainting is still extremely valuable if you’re using this comparator system, and Jonathan discovered that too. You can paint very thinly if you have an underpainting. If you’re painting alla prima over this dark ground, you have to really pile on the paint, and it’s a waste – a waste of money.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

EP: So he actually helped and enriched your hypothesis rather than disproving it?

DW: Not as far as he’s concerned.

TJ: At that point in time he said, ‘Okay, I see that I can make an underpainting and make this thing work.’ His basic stance was, ‘I thought that there were reasons that Vermeer couldn’t have used this, but no, I don’t see it as totally incompatible with what we know about Vermeer.’ On that basis he wrote this little article on his website and said, ‘I’ve been to Texas. I tried this thing out. It’s not incompatible with underpainting and it looks like it’s not incompatible with what we do know about Vermeer.’ In other words, ‘I was not able to falsify it.’ That article sat there on his website for a week or two and then all hell broke loose, a flame war.

EP: From his followers you mean?

TJ: Yeah.

TJ: Jonathan was in there too, debating the hypothesis. I think his level of believing that the comparator was used fluctuates, too, just like it does with me, although my belief level is generally much higher. In the film I said it was ninety per cent and occasionally there are things that make me wonder and it drops. Jonathan seems to be going down. He seems to be gravitating lower.

DW: When there’s more at stake, he – like all human beings – will exert his personal bias more. He doesn’t lose status by saying to you that it’s possible, but he does by saying it to the world, as he discovered. When I mentioned to him that flame war, as you called it, he said it wasn’t like that at all – there were only a couple of people that blogged hundreds of times. In fact he pointed out, legitimately, that of the three quotes I used in my foreword to the exhibition catalogue, two of them came from one person.

TJ: Mr Uppercase. Yeah.

EP: I understand that so well because sometimes, just in my own writing, I want to develop an idea that contradicts mainstream feminism, which is what I consider to be my group. I can leave that group to discuss my idea with my friends or colleagues, but to actually turn around and say it to that group – it’s almost impossible. It hurts. It actually physically hurts because they’re going to kick you out. It’s terrifying.

DW: Our exhibition On the Origin of Art addresses biological processes in art. When I get criticised I just send them Elizabeth’s introduction to the On the Origin of Art exhibition catalogue. One of the key theorists on the biological differences between men and women happens to be a woman. My critics say, ‘You said this!’ and I say, ‘Here’s the reference – Sarah Hrdy,’ and it stops them dead.

TJ: Well it is kind of interesting that you get into these weird, little factions of nooks and crannies of some technical, arcane detail of some field and there will be people who have been at each other’s throats for months and years, but they’re interested in exactly the same thing. They have so much in common.

DW: The standard Christian position that the father and son are essentially the same age was disputed by the Arians, one of the Christian offshoots. And reasonably disputed – because do fathers tend to be older than sons? It was, one would think, a minor point, but it managed to get the entire group killed.

TJ: Well, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

EP: So why isn’t there any definitive historical evidence for use of optics of any kind?

TJ: Not for Vermeer or Caravaggio or most of the people we’re talking about. The first kind of stronger evidence – but not airtight – is from Canaletto, much later, who painted Venice. It sure looks like he was using a camera obscura, and there is a camera obscura in a museum in Italy that has Canaletto’s name on it.

DW: They used Canaletto in sea-level studies because his paintings were so accurate.

TJ: Much later than Vermeer. In Vermeer’s time camera obscuras were around and they did talk about them in relation to art. Samuel Hoogstraten, a painter and a writer, said – to paraphrase, he said, ‘Yeah, you should look at this camera obscura. It’s going to be very useful to painters to see this.’ But, like Jonathan sometimes says, there’s no documentation about how to make a paint brush either. Not all aspects of art were documented. There was no internet. There were no newspapers. People were largely illiterate, and the painter’s studio was something of an enigma. A patron took pride in being able to visit the artist’s workshop. They didn’t like to just have people wandering in. Hockney points out that most modern artists don’t like to talk about their tricks. They all have their secrets. Norman Rockwell said, ‘I use the epidiascope but I don’t talk about it. It just saves so much time to take a photograph and trace it.’ But he acknowledged that there was a stigma, that it was not something he would openly talk about. But most painters that I’ve talked to will admit that they use photography as a reference – Jonathan Janson included.

DW: My sister did a picture of her daughter, Misty. My sister’s quite a talented artist. It’s a sketch but with painted eyes. It’s quite a beautiful thing. I commented on how beautiful it was thirty years ago and she said, ‘I cheated, I used a photo.’ For her, that was the end of it being art.

TJ: Yeah, and then there are the hyper-realists that just make a photograph with paint – a human inkjet printer. They’re copying every point on that photograph. But why don’t we know about Vermeer and others’ use of optics? Why wouldn’t this be written somewhere? The camera obscura at least is in the literature but there’s nothing about this comparator mirror.

EP: You don’t think that it’s necessarily the case that Vermeer and others were actively concealing it? It could just be that, like you said, they just didn’t document everything about the process of making a painting?

TJ: I don’t know, but it’s a really good argument. You would think it’s so effective, so powerful, that somebody should have said something, and when did it die out, and when did people stop using it? Leonardo is the first real, earliest case where I can find a reference to anything like this concept, where he said, ‘The mirror should be the master of the painter. You should look at your subject reflected in a mirror and compare it to your painting’ – which is what this process does, exactly. Now, he didn’t say, ‘Carefully match the colour right at the edge of the mirror.’ He does, though, talk about that basic edge-matching later in the same book. He says, ‘If I want to paint a mountain and I don’t really know what colour it is, I’ll put a little paint on a card and hold it up next to the mountain,’ and you’ve got to have light on it and so on. So he knew about that basic concept. Even if that’s not what Leonardo was talking about it’s possible somebody else read what Leonardo said and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to try that. It sounds useful.’

Jarrod Rawlins: How does the Claude glass fit into that?

TJ: Most people think that Leonardo is talking about looking at your painting in the mirror. It’s not what he’s talking about there. He does talk about that later.

DW: It would be difficult for anyone to interpret it the way you have until after knowledge of your device. If you’re reading it with that information, you’re going to read it in a different way. I read it and thought, ‘Okay, that’s a description of the comparator’ and then I thought, ‘How could anyone not have noticed that?’ Because they didn’t know about the comparator. Right?

TJ: Well, Leonardo does amplify on it a little bit and he says, ‘Seeing the image in the mirror removes it from its context.’ He seems to be talking about a more general application, not trying to make a perfect copy, but a Claude glass is a similar thing. It’s taking the thing out of its context. It’s a black, curved surface. Our eyes have trouble seeing smooth gradients of a large area. We just can’t know that that is a five and that is a seven. We just don’t know that. We tend to see them both as six. In a Claude glass or a small camera obscura everything is compressed closer together and there, our retinas can see the difference better because they’re closer. If you bring them right together so they touch you have no problem telling that one’s brighter or darker than the other. The farther away you get in visual degrees, the harder that is. So the Claude glass helps you bring that together. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Claude actually used the glass to paint landscapes, or if it just had his name. But Leonardo was influential. His works were published in Milan, for example. Caravaggio could have seen them. He travelled in those circles. In my alternate history Caravaggio, and maybe a few other people, knew about this, and they’re kind of keeping it to themselves. They sometimes let other people see what they’re doing but it’s not widely known.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

EP: David, I know we’re not talking about proof here, but speculate for me. Why would Vermeer and others want to conceal their use of optics?

DW: Up until very recently I thought it’s because if you can do something that no one else can do it enhances your status, and status is something that we’re biologically compelled to seek. Conspicuous consumption. Viagra, big dick, you know. You said you were coming to this moment? Well this moment came. So, you’re having a one-night stand, perhaps you’re trying to impress each other. Is Viagra okay? Well it’s probably going to permute the way your partner interprets your sexual prowess. So it’s cheating – if it might develop into something more than a one-night stand, and if you haven’t disclosed it. Now…

EP: Hang on. Can I stop you there for a second? Why are we comparing Viagra and painting? At the level of argument.

DW: We’re just talking about the nature of cheating and sexual metaphor is always attractive.

EP: So you’re assuming that painting is something that we do to display our skills or our abilities to enhance our status in an evolutionary sense…

DW: Yes, I see your point. Normally the context of this, within our circles, is assumed, but it would sound strange to a lay audience or a non-Mona audience. Yes, it is my firm belief that art is adaptive, or it’s nearly adaptive. It’s either adaptive because it is biologically useful in and of itself, and people making art somehow enhances their reproductive status; or it’s nearly adaptive, in that it is among the things than can enhance your status, so it’s useful in a less direct way. It’s a way of showing off. We have a metaphor in English that is just so potent that it makes it clear that it’s part of our subsumed knowledge and that is, ‘Come upstairs and see my etchings.’

EP: This an idea that you’re familiar with, Tim?

TJ: Yeah, of course.

EP: Not the part about the etchings, the part about art being adaptive.

TJ: I have etchings if you’d like to see them.

EP: Go on, David.

DW: So, if Vermeer knew something that enhanced his status, there’s a number of ways that he might justify concealing it. He might not tell anyone so that no one else can create like he can. He might not tell anyone because it undermines the possibility that he can be treated as a transcendent genius, even though, apparently, he wasn’t. In other words he’ll do anything… This is an interesting thing. People, and particularly males, will do anything – including genuinely being good at things – to enhance their status. Mathematicians only ever do anything worthwhile until they’re breeding or while they’re of an age of likely breeding. They’re nerds, so otherwise they’re not going to get laid.

TJ: Caravaggio, you can call him a ‘swinging dick’.

DW: ‘A phenomenal root rat’, you would say in the Australian vernacular.

TJ: And Torrentius in Holland was another one. He took great pride in painting these extremely realistic pictures, still lifes.

DW: What about Casanova? Casanova was such a good writer that the ladies wanted to fuck him for the sole reason that they would then end up in his books. So he closed the circle.

EP: David – and I’m going to ask you this question in a minute, Tim – let’s just say that we have established that Vermeer and others used this system or something like it. How does that affect how you perceive his art?

DW: I think he’s a fraud and I think he’s a crap artist. Let’s assume Tim is right. If Vermeer did it exactly in the way that Tim describes then he’s a fraud and a nobody and we should take him out of the canon of great artists. But the exception is if he had to cheat for reasons that were outside of his control. I hadn’t thought of this – and it probably doesn’t apply to Vermeer because of where he was, in the Protestant world. But Roberta [Lapucci] pointed out to me something that I should have already known, and it was this. In 1610 Galileo points his telescope at Jupiter and he sees Jupiter, Ganymede, Io, Europa and Callisto. He then uses that as evidence that all bodies don’t go round the earth. It isn’t evidence – it’s completely conclusive. They’re going around Jupiter, so they’re not going around the Earth. Okay. What does that mean for what’s called the Ptolemaic system, that says the Earth is the centre of the universe? Well it means it’s bullshit. Right? But to say the Catholic Church had a dog in the hunt regarding this matter is the greatest understatement of all time. Galileo didn’t even manage to get the word out for thirty-something years and when he did, he was castigated – possibly for other reasons as well, because he also heaped shit on the Pope. It seems that in Italy, if you used any optical apparatus to do anything, you would have been roundly castigated. I think that’s a perfectly valid hypothesis for Caravaggio. Does it also apply in the Protestant world? Well, it’s pretty well known that the telescope was invented in Holland and that Galileo built it only after hearing a description from a guy called Hans Lippershey. Yeah, so we know that, and because we know that, that might be an indicator that it wasn’t anywhere near as undermining to the Protestant religion, and also we’re talking about 100 years later. In 1665 there was a book written called The History of Optics. Such things probably wouldn’t have occurred. That’s pretty close to Vermeer. I don’t think you could have written such a book in 1600 in Italy. When Bruno talked about such things he ended up being used to roast marshmallows. It’s an alternative hypothesis that has some merit. So let’s say Vermeer used optics but couldn’t tell anyone because he’d get his arse kicked. Well then that’s okay.

EP: He’s in?

DW: He’s in. He stays in the canon. But if he did it solely to be a big swinging dick then no, he’s out as far as I’m concerned.

EP: So we’re talking here about the possibility – as you say in your foreword to the catalogue – that when we look at a Vermeer painting, we’re looking at a 350 year-old, handmade, colour photograph of his studio. We don’t exclude photographs from the canon of great art. Assuming Tim is right, why can’t Vermeer still be considered a great artist?

DW: But we only consider photography great art when the knowledge of photography isn’t suppressed. It emerges in the 1820s and then suddenly it’s universal. Five years later there are photos of women being fucked by donkeys. So we moved on very quickly.

EP: So it’s the concealing of what Paul Bloom calls the ‘honesty of effort’ – that’s the thing that matters to you? We need to be aware of the kind of conditions under which an artist created their work, in order to appraise it?

DW: Bloom also talks about the doctrine of essentialism, the idea that an object has something embedded in it by its author. Why do I want an original letter by Albert Einstein that tells me nothing that I couldn’t have found out somewhere else, or indeed purchased a facsimile of it for a couple of bucks? I was down at Salamanca Market and I see a map, a Dutch map. I said, ‘I own that map’ and the stallholder said, ‘Yes, I’ve sold lots of them.’ What’s the difference between the one she’s selling for $5 and the one that I paid $100,000 for? They’re the same map. It’s very hard to know, but that’s the doctrine of essentialism. There’s something embedded in it, right? When the artist hasn’t embedded the knowledge that enabled him to create it, I think it undermines the essentialism. I got that idea from the same guy – Paul Bloom.

EP: Sorry Tim, I’m going to give you a chance to respond properly in a minute, but I wrote a little mini essay. Will you indulge me for a second?

DW: This is targeted directly at the audience? Is this what they call ‘breaking the fourth wall’?

TJ: No. That would be pointing at the camera.

DW: This is the second wall.

TJ: Yeah, exactly.

EP: My reason is, I’m trying to put myself in your brain here…

DW: You’re going to get squashed.

EP: So here goes:
‘Art, in an evolutionary context, is essentially a signalling system. Looking at it that way, it’s clear that Vermeer was cheating because he’s faking his signal. We don’t judge art objectively in and of itself. We judge it as part of a performance, a signal of the artist’s fitness. To accurately judge that performance we need to know how, when, by whom it was performed, what tools did they have at their disposal, how did they overcome obstacles and handicaps? For instance if we look at a painting and we think a two-year old did it, we think, my God, that’s incredible. But then we find out that actually her Dad did it for her, and we think it’s crap. We judge it differently according to the context.’

DW: Yes. It’s lost its essential nature.

EP: This is obviously not unique to art. It’s about any kind of fakery in any kind of human endeavour.

DW: Amotz Zahavi proved that in a signalling system the signaller and the signallee have to share the same information base. For example, I can’t interpret Chinese singing. I don’t know if it’s good. You just mentioned the signaller then, but if the signallee is deceived, then it’s not an honest signal and it doesn’t indicate anything about the fitness of the signaller.

EP: So you’ve been duped basically?

DW: Yes. You’re banging out of your league.

EP: So Vermeer is actually being immoral according to that code?

DW: Exactly.

EP: Yep, okay. Tim you write in your essay – it leapt out at me, and I couldn’t wait to ask you about it. You write that you actually don’t think Vermeer is cheating and that for you, beauty is beauty, however that beauty is produced. Is that still how you feel?

TJ: Yeah, and I don’t think we know that Vermeer would have thought that that would be cheating, even if he was hiding his use of the comparator mirror. One obvious possibility is that his patron, his first customer, did know about it, and then that was forgotten, in which case I think you’d agree that it wasn’t cheating.

DW: No, they’re both cheating.

TJ: But what if it’s forgotten?

DW: His patron and him share a signal that they’ve given to the rest of the world. ‘Come upstairs and see my etchings’ – it doesn’t say that you made the etchings.

TJ: I see.

EP: The patron is kind of piggy-backing on the enhanced, or faked, status.

DW: In fact, I believe that Tim may well be self-deceiving here. If he says what I say – which is that Vermeer was either a consummate genius or a piece of shit, and there’s no in between – his chance of having his hypothesis accepted is diminished. I don’t think he can easily take on that hypothesis.

TJ: Your point is well taken. But, Vermeer – he lived in his time. We can’t put ourselves in his shoes. We don’t know what their attitudes were.

DW: But we’re trying to put ourselves in his eyes. Why can’t we try to understand more deeply?

TJ: Nobody wrote about these things. We know that this was a turbulent time, especially with Galileo being persecuted for being scientific.

DW: He was persecuted because he put shit on the Pope. He used the name ‘Simplicius’ as the counter-argument to the Copernican system, right? Simplicius was also the nickname of the Pope. He was essentially accusing the Pope of being a moron. It had nothing to do with the argument being made, in my opinion.

TJ: There was another painter who probably used optics, named Torrentius, maybe forty or fifty years before Vermeer, in the town of Haarlem, not far away…

DW: Do you think he used the comparator?

TJ: I do, and he was a swinging dick. He was a man about town. He had orgies. He was adored for his art. He was an atheist. He may have been a Rosicrucian, which maybe could explain why the church was so exercised, but…

DW: He was atheist and it’s funny – people would now assume, if they didn’t have any insight into that period in religious history, that atheism was worse than having a weird brand of Christianity, but in fact it wasn’t. Atheism was pretty well tolerated. What wasn’t tolerated was not believing in the right brand of Christianity.

TJ: Isn’t that interesting. So Torrentius was tortured. All of his artworks were destroyed. They said that his pictures were so realistic that you couldn’t tell you were looking at a picture. He made two kinds of art. The other kind of art was pencil drawings, mostly pornographic – people pissing on each other, screwing each other and so forth, and they were not good drawings by all accounts. So you have two things that Torrentius did – these amazing still lifes, without people, that look like photographs – and in fact a lot of people a hundred years ago thought that maybe Torrentius had discovered photography but all the evidence was destroyed. There are no paintings. So he was tortured and all of his artworks were destroyed. He was spirited out of Holland into England, where he never painted again. The English King wanted to rescue him because they admired his artwork. Fast forward to the 1900s. Somebody’s in a grocery store in Amsterdam and they found a lid on a barrel that was an oil painting. They lifted the lid and said, ‘Why is the seal of the King of England on this lid?’ It turns out this is a missing Torrentius. One of his drawings exists, too. You can see the dramatic difference. That story would have gone around and Vermeer almost certainly would have known about it. He knew people from Haarlem. There was, by the way, a real streak of realist painting in Haarlem – still lifes. It’s possible that that gives you that religious out, and lets Vermeer back in the club.

DW: So tell me, Torrentius’ paintings were destroyed because of his beliefs and behaviour, or because of the nature of the paintings?

TJ: Well, it looks like maybe they were just after a Rosicrucian but they said that it was other reasons. His lifestyle. He defiled God apparently. There was testimony that he said that the Bible might not be true. They trumped up all these charges. He was tortured and never admitted to any of the charges. He just said he was a guy that could paint – although before that he didn’t help his case, because somebody said, ‘How do you paint these amazing pictures?’ and he said, ‘It’s not me that paints. I lay the canvas on the floor, I hear the sound of buzzing bees and the painting paints itself.’ That sounds a little suspicious – like the work of the devil.

EP: So hang on, so it sounds to me like you’re coming more towards David’s position, which is that if you could establish that there were extenuating religious reasons that the painters concealed these processes, then you accept that they can keep their place in the canon. But if it was purely cheating, then they can’t?

TJ: I think my position is probably a little different. I think it probably wouldn’t have been that remarkable. They were using all sorts of machinery to make art. These perspective machines that Dürer put in his etchings… I mean, the whole book, Martin Kemp’s book, The Science of Art, there’s a whole chapter of these machines used to make paintings. Leonardo painted this perspective pyramid where you’re looking at a painted glass and you can actually trace and get accurate perspective on a piece of glass. ‘The mirror should be the master of the artist.’ That seems to be implying that it’s commonplace for artists to use aids and enhance their perception in one way or another. In Vermeer’s time we just don’t know. There was another contemporary of Vermeer, Fabritius, who lived in Delft at the same time. They almost certainly were friends. Most of Fabritius’ work was destroyed in a big explosion called the Thunderclap [when a gunpowder store exploded in Delft] and we don’t have many of his paintings left. But one of them is a little picture called A View of Delft and it’s sort of an anamorphic fisheye picture of the new church in Delft and it looks like it was made with some sort of optical process. Then there are all these others, such as Holbein and The Ambassadors, where you have this skull that you can only see from an angle and the table is covered with optical instruments. Vermeer painted two scientists in his work, The Geographer and The Astronomer, who look a lot like a portrait of Leeuwenhoek, the microscopist who was born in the same month as Vermeer in Delft and lived a couple blocks away. He was an optical expert, and ground the world’s best lenses for microscopes. I think it was just part of the wallpaper. It was like having personal computers today. Optics was the Pentium chip and it was everywhere. The telescope was the fastest-adopted technology in that time. Nobody had them, then fifty years later everybody had them. The lens that I used in Tim’s Vermeer was essentially a telescope lens. It’s exactly what you’d expect to find on the far end, the objective lens, of a telescope. They would have been around and they would have been extremely good lenses.

DW: But you said extremely good lenses weren’t necessary?

TJ: No, but they were good. People have argued that the lenses couldn’t have been very good but in fact they were.

EP: I think that, quite appropriately, you’re not committing that historical fallacy of pretending to know what it’s like to be in that world. But what about just for you, now, here today. When you look at a Vermeer or a Caravaggio – and let’s say you’re completely convinced it was produced using optics. How are you affected, emotionally, by that knowledge?

TJ: Well, I’m more interested in an optical-looking picture, but I apparently have a hound in this hunt, so that might be why I like looking at those sorts of pictures.

DW: But it’s a good question. Before you got into this were you someone that looked at Caravaggios? I remember seeing the de La Tours in the Louvre – the Mona Lisa didn’t do much for me, but they just floored me completely. Now I look at a de La Tour and they do nothing for me. You killed it. You killed my appreciation of art and I’m going to close Mona down and join a convent.

TJ: Is it for sale then?

DW: You can have it.

TJ: Yeah? Thank you. Did we get that on tape?

DW: Yeah. But you’ve got to keep it open.

TJ: That’s the catch, oh dear. Yeah, like David, I went to the Louvre and I saw Vermeers, I saw de La Tours. There is something that looks anachronistic about them, that they’re out of time, that they’re from the future, that somehow they got a Polaroid camera.

DW: Yeah. I get that more with the de La Tours more than anyone else. And even though they’re photographs, they don’t photograph well. You assume that the photo is an approximation, but it isn’t. I don’t know if you’ve answered my question. Before you were interested in optics were you interested in art?

TJ: Yes.

DW: What was your favourite picture? I know you’re a Rembrandt fan. Were you always a Rembrandt fan or did it become clear to you that he was the only genius who didn’t use optics?

TJ: I’m not sure he didn’t use optics, but yeah, Rembrandt went up a notch when I put him in the context with optical Dutch art because it looks pretty clearly like he was just a very unusually great painter.

DW: Imagine if you don’t know about something that everyone else is using…

EP: Imagine how ripped off you’d feel!

DW: No, but you’ve got to lift your game. You’re got to try to be…

TJ: I have a fantasy that Pieter de Hooch who painted pictures extremely similar to Vermeer and lived in Delft, was just tearing his hair out trying to figure out how Vermeer did it, sort of like the movie Amadeus with Salieri saying, ‘Damn him, how did he do that?’ and de Hooch did go crazy, apparently. But Vermeer just has this incredible look that de Hooch…

DW: Was he more successful than Vermeer at the time, arguably?

TJ: Well, he turned out a lot of pictures, and Vermeer was poor. We know that.

DW: Yeah, the Salieri thing. In the conception of the movie, everyone except Salieri believes that Salieri is better than Mozart, and Salieri knows that that’s complete shit.

EP: This is leading into what I wanted to talk about which was the idea of genius. You touched on it briefly before, when we were talking about Bloom’s idea of – well, the term he uses is ‘positive contagion’. That one of the reasons that we value authenticity in art is because it is seen to be imbued with something essential about the person who made it and the particular time and place, and that somehow you can kind of catch that by touching the real one. A copy of the original, one that looks exactly the same, but which is not the same, is worthless. It’s the same to talk about sentimental objects, like my child’s first pair of shoes. I keep those as a sentimental object – if you replace them with a completely identical pair, I don’t want those, they have no interest to me.

DW: The dish that had been on the Titanic is the amazing archetype of this.

EP: Through this process of ‘positive contagion’ – and this is more my take on Bloom’s work – somehow we’re brought into contact with the idea of genius, an idea we are endlessly emotionally invested in. In Tim’s Vermeer Penn says, ‘Unfathomable genius doesn’t really mean anything. Now he’s a fathomable genius’, which I thought was a lovely quote. I want to ask both of you – is there such a thing as genius?

TJ: Well, yeah. The word has a meaning…

DW: That’s exactly where I would have gone, but I think you know what she means.

TJ: Something ineffable, something not able to be understood. That’s what a lot of people mean when they talk about Vermeer’s genius – that it goes beyond understanding. You can’t describe it. You can’t analyse. It’s just there. To me that’s kind of a supernatural concept and I’m not a supernaturalist.

EP: That ties into that idea of unweaving the rainbow, how Keats said Newton was destroying the beauty of the rainbow by explaining it, and if you try to explain something mysterious then you kill it.

DW: And Newton was and is, many would argue, the most creative person of all time. But he said, famously, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ There’re about twenty-six reasons why that’s strange but one of them is that if he wasn’t so fucking smart he wouldn’t have been able to think of something that elegant. But in fact, a little bit of digging shows that we have completely misinterpreted that statement forever. The giants were the Greeks, right, and he was basically saying that he learnt nothing from Robert Hooke, his biggest competitor. That’s been misinterpreted by everyone forever, but it’s quite well known in scientific circles that he meant something completely different.

EP: I guess what you’re saying is that the idea of genius is tied somehow, even if it’s not explicitly stated, to something supernatural and you don’t believe in supernatural explanations. So it doesn’t have resonance for you?

TJ: Well, in the dictionary sense of the word, absolutely I believe in it, that it’s a measure of intelligence I guess.

DW: What’s the difference between genius and brilliance?

TJ: It’s a graduation…

DW: Schopenhauer said, ‘The brilliant hit a target that no one else can hit. The genius hits a target that no one else can see.’

TJ: That’s nice.

DW: It sounds like crap to me, though, and also it’s got the same problem that the Newton thing has. You can’t think of it unless you’re…

EP: Why does it sound like crap to you?

DW: I know what the word genius means, just like I know what the word infinity means, and I don’t think anyone is ever going to obtain either of them, because they’re nonsense. They’re not available. I’m a little bit better at table tennis than almost everyone in the world, but there are still probably twenty or thirty thousand people who can beat me. How did I get better? Because I started to get a tiny bit better and that got me interested. So I kept doing it and I got better and better and better. It’s a feedback mechanism. When Federer started playing tennis I suspect he was just slightly better than everybody else. And there’s also this thing that now we have access to everyone on the planet, outliers are given undue prominence, if there’s a reasonable distribution. You don’t talk about anyone that’s between average and pretty damn good. You cut out a big point of the distribution and it looks ridiculous. But also the closest thing to talent is to do something that makes no sense and then happen to get a statistical outlier. I talked about it in my book. There’s probably about the same number of tennis players and people who work in finance, about a hundred million or so, in the world. I would say that the average income of people who work in finance is higher than the average income for tennis by a mile. But the biggest incomes are in tennis because of that funny distribution. Genius is that thing that when you do it well, disguises the fact that you shouldn’t have done it at all. Tell me someone who’s described as a genius who was wrong about their essential argument – because there should be just as many of those. It’s essentially having a wild idea that has very little merit at the time you propose it and then turning out and being right and then having the retrospective analysis say, ‘He was right and he didn’t have any information’ and they don’t say, ‘Well, that was lucky.’ They say, ‘He’s a fucking genius’.

EP: It makes me think of the time I saw David give a talk and someone put their hand up at the end and said, ‘David, it’s possible that you have autism or that you’re on the spectrum in some way. My son has just been diagnosed with autism. What advice would you give to him and to our family?’ Instead of saying, ‘Tell him he can do what he wants, reach for the stars,’ what David said was, ‘I strongly recommend that you seek treatment and you see your doctor. You’re going to have a hard road ahead of you.’

DW: Yeah. The embedded question was, ‘How can I get my son to turn out like you?’ and I am this close to having sat in the corner all my life. That’s just not a bet you should make, and that was the answer I gave, essentially.

EP: It’s the same as if someone said to Federer, ‘What would you say to a young aspiring tennis player?’ ‘Quit playing tennis and go and become an accountant.’

DW: Agassi actually says that.

TJ: Well in painting, there is genius, and I tend to think of it like David describes. You seem to be good and you try to be better. In the apprentice system people start at a very young age and that’s critical in a lot of fields, probably in tennis as well. Four years old. Maybe the game’s all over by then.

DW: Yeah, pretty well. Particularly in women’s tennis, the commentators say things like, ‘Yes, you can see the weakness in her backhand, but then she didn’t start playing tennis until she was seven.’

TJ: Right, yeah. Took it up late in life. My idea of genius in that sense is JS Bach, who has never been surpassed and probably never will be.

DW: Hasn’t been surpassed – a fair argument. Never will be…

TJ: In counterpoint, in composing counterpoint. Counterpoint is a lost art now and largely because JS Bach…

DW: It isn’t lost forever, necessarily.

TJ: No, probably not, and probably some AI will prove us wrong sooner than later.

DW: They can beat us at chess now.

TJ: But he was the result of a long line of composers that all started young and they all built sequentially on that knowledge, and he was probably just a very smart guy and a very hard-working guy. But it’s intimidating to hear Bach if you’re a composer. And if an artist was cheating, and it is really not possible to sit down in a room and paint a Vermeer, then there’s a benefit to exposing that, because artists are thinking, ‘I will never be able to paint like that, so I am not going to do that.’ I heard Art Tatum play jazz piano as a youngster and I go, ‘I was thinking about playing jazz piano. Now I’m not thinking about it at all because I could never even get close to that.’ It’s been done.

DW: Yes. I call that the enabling and the disabling. In the enabling category, for authors, is Isaac Asimov, an unbelievably good writer – but anyone can write like him. All you’ve got to do is take away all the bullshit. That sounds simple. Or not so simple, but you can learn. Then there’s Vladimir Nabokov. When I read him I am utterly disabled, because he says things, and the words seem to have been handed on a platter from God. I wonder what technology he had that we’re going to find…

EP: Imagine if we find out he was cheating!

DW: Because he’s so disabling, I would be delighted.

TJ: I think Bach did it with mirrors.

EP: Tim, you’ve become involved in a project of demystifying genius, even if that wasn’t really your intention. David, you’ve had a long-standing interest in demystifying genius, whether that’s artistic genius or table tennis.

DW: I opened a bloody gallery and I don’t know anything about art and I put a few pictures on the wall incongruously, in a way that people with some expertise wouldn’t do it. The very reason that I have a crowd is because of my lack of expertise. Because I couldn’t compete as an art historian, I had to make up my own domain. That made it very successful and now people are calling me a genius. It’s the exact counterpoint to what I was attempting to do. I was attempting to learn the basics. I was at one end of the distribution. In fact I am wobbly training wheels for real museums. I can’t remember the number, but a higher percentage of people who have never gone to an art gallery in Australia visit Mona. No surprise, because it’s fun in here, but it’s only fun because I knew nothing.

EP: Do you think that there’s something essentially pernicious about the myth of genius?

DW: Essentially pernicious? I’m just going to think about the beauty of that phrase before I work out what the hell you’re talking about.

EP: Is there something that’s essentially worth demystifying about genius, or is it just because it’s fun to do?

DW: You don’t embark on things because they have value. The value emerges later. I kind of like these campaigns where you get people like Jolie or Pitt to strip their gear off and they’ve got a bit of flab or a birthmark or something. The idea of a role model disgusts me, that there’s something special about someone that you should attempt to emulate. It’s probably the same as essentialism – that intellectually disgusts me, but I can’t walk away from it. Why do I want to own a first edition of Origin of Species signed by Charles Darwin? Why? I don’t know. If I want to know something, I can read about it on Wikipedia. Tim mentioned Torrentius. The first time he mentioned Torrentius, I had never heard of him. What do you do? You go to Google Wikipedia. That’s where you start your research. I reckon everybody does that now. And no one thinks, ‘Gee, there’s no genius behind Wikipedia.’ What if I said, ‘I’m the guy that wrote Wikipedia’, and you believe me? I’d look pretty damn smart.

TJ: So it is a work of genius?

DW: It is a work of genius but it isn’t made by a genius, nor a set of geniuses. Knowledge emerges from falsification. There’s a foment of ideas and then there’s a sieving process from which knowledge emerges, that drops through. Then you go back and you say, ‘Okay, there are these four thousand ideas, and this one said the thing that we now believe. Holy Christ. How did he know?’ and it’s always ‘he’, that really shits me, too.

JR: So is collective genius possible?

DW: Well that’s what it is, yes. If you define genius as getting somewhere when you can’t see the steps – the ‘black swan’ versus a very white swan… The best example is Michael Faraday, an English experimenter, in electricity mainly, but also chemistry. He was self-taught. He was arguably – because he managed to achieve a lot in a number of fields – a pretty bright guy. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone, which is like the British tax collector, was visiting him, and he’s looking at this thing that is now called the Faraday Bridge – the sparks jump from one side to the other. William Gladstone says to him, ‘That’s very beautiful Michael, but what’s it for?’ and Faraday says – this is as close to genius as you can get – ‘I have no idea what it’s for, but I can tell you this, one day you’ll find a way to tax it.’

TJ: Beautiful and true.

EP: I’ve just got a couple more questions. Tim, you wrote in a marketing text for us that this exhibition scares you. What exactly scares you about it?

TJ: Well, with Tim’s Vermeer everything was totally under my control, with the exception of editing the film. Everything I did in my studio was my own work. But one of the questions was, ‘What if somebody else was doing this? What result would they get?’ And that’s what David said – ‘Let’s do some more experiments.’ I’m already surprised. It’s not what I expected, to see all these people using the same machine and getting incredibly different results. Scary but exhilarating. I guess what I meant was that everything I know may be wrong, and that’s disconcerting. I may have hallucinated this entire hypothesis. It may be utterly wrong, and if you read every other book on the topic, I am wrong, because the comparator mirror doesn’t exist.

DW: This harkens back to my genius, right? Tim’s essential idea is very, very good. The comparator works. People walk in and they draw something and you look at it, and there’s something essential – the other sense of essential – in the picture. I look at it and it happens to be that I’m one of the subjects and quite a lot of the drawings are of me. I look at them and I think, ‘Yeah, right. I didn’t see that before’ in my own face.

Hound in the HuntPhoto Credit: Mona/Rémi ChauvinImage Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Hound in the Hunt Photo Credit: Mona/Rémi Chauvin Image Courtesy Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

TJ: Wow.

DW: Now. That this technology exists – it either existed before, in which case you’re only a re-discoverer and you’ll get credit. One day you’ll be a hero. Or it didn’t exist before, and he’s the first human being ever to think of it, which would deserve vastly more credit because then he’s triumphed over all of humanity forever. But no, this time, when he actually did something that no one ever thought of before, this time he’s a fucking fool because he was wrong. You’ve got to be right to be called a genius.

TJ: Another possibility is the comparator doesn’t work and I’m just a really great painter.

DW: It’s an uncanny coincidence that almost every good undiscovered artist has been to the gallery in the last two weeks and it’s all going to fall apart.

EP: David you wrote in the [Hound in the Hunt] catalogue – and I think it was just a joke, an off-hand comment – that in the unlikely event that this exhibition isn’t a complete fiasco, there’s going to be a second volume of the catalogue. What would constitute a complete fiasco for you?

DW: Yes, it was a throwaway line. What I was trying to do was not have the formality of ‘Volume two, with our conclusions, will follow’. In science, experiments that fail used to not be published, for the most part. They now do a number of things, such as citation analysis, meta studies. For instance we only have studies of cigarette smoking that show it’s dangerous, because the two or three per cent that should, statistically, have shown that it wasn’t dangerous, don’t get published. If you look back at the literature you can do the maths and you can find that in the 1950s exactly the opposite happened. So when you do a scientific study you have data and you publish a paper. You are committed to making that data available, right? Someone did a very – in my opinion – genius study of scientific fraud. They just picked thousands of papers at random and wrote to the authors and asked for the data. If they didn’t get it, they asked again. If they didn’t get it, they asked again. Sixty five per cent of people never sent the data. Conclusion? Sixty five per cent of papers are actual fraud – and that’s not the ones that are just self-deceiving. I was thinking when I wrote that off-hand remark that if we don’t prove anything we just won’t publish, like everybody else.

TJ: That’s not very admirable by the way.

DW: At least I admit it. Well, at least I’m conscious of it. At least when I’m a fraud, I’m a conscious fraud.

EP: If you had discovered this technology and you were in Vermeer’s place, would you have used it and tried to get away with it?

DW: Listen, I have discovered a technology that’s relatively simple, that’s made me outrageous amounts of money, right, and I don’t tell anyone how I do it.

EP: Are we about to get a scoop?

DW: And it’s not just because it made an outrageous amount of money. It’s also because, in fact, there’s not much ingenuity there at all. At the moment I’m a black box, a black swan box, and people go, ‘Gee, he’s clever’. They keep telling me I’m a mathematical genius. I employ dozens of mathematicians and they’re all better than me. Why would I employ someone who wasn’t? Yeah, so the mathematical genius thing is quite funny for me and occasionally I run with it.

TJ: But you thought of this technology, and maybe more importantly, you recognised it?

DW: I didn’t even think of it. Phil Turner, who’s a complete wastrel, thought of it, but because he’s a complete wastrel, no one will ever know, except for the eight people that ever read this interview.

TJ: Well, since nobody’s paying any attention, you can tell us what it is, right?

EP: Tim, I’m going to assume that you would also have indulged this technology, had it come to you and you had the opportunity.

TJ: And would I have hidden it? I’m not sure. I like to think I’m an honest person…

EP: Aha, so you clearly do think it’s dishonest.

DW: She’s slaughtered you. We might as well stop here. In fact, cut.

TJ: I try to do the right thing, like a lot of people…

DW: Here’s the evidence that Tim would have cheated. Apparently, if we believe someone who isn’t him – an art historian, Roberta – everyone did it. Titian did it, Velasquez did it. And there is no documentation of it. Now, I’m sure some of them were honest men. The reality is that Tim would have kept it a secret because we have statistical evidence that everyone did. For whatever reason, they did. Or, the whole thing is a load of crap.

TJ: I would say that they wouldn’t have perceived it as being wrong.

DW: And neither would have you.

TJ: Maybe. That’s stipulated in my premise. Had I known it would be wrong, I would have tried to do the right thing.

EP: You seem very hesitant to commit that kind of historical fallacy.

TJ: Anthropologists are famous for projecting their modern ideas on ancient cultures and I think that’s a real danger here.

DW: Have you read The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond?

TJ: It’s on my list.

DW: Well, he doesn’t do that. He is wonderful.

TJ: You have to keep an open mind and not just accept things that you can’t prove, when there’s not much information.

DW: If you’re one of the eight people reading this… now am I breaking the fourth wall?

TJ: Sure.

DW: If you’re one of the eight people reading this and you happen to have gone to the end first, don’t read the rest of it, just go and read that book, because it will change your life, and nothing we are ever going to say will.

TJ: So he doesn’t have a hound in the hunt?

DW: He’s got a greyhound in the poodle race.

EP: I read that book just after I had Jack and I wanted to reverse engineer justification for having him sleep in bed with me – everyone kept telling me it was dangerous to have your baby sleep in bed with you, but I read the parenting chapter of that book and it said, ‘Yes, you can do it.’

DW: I’m not sure if it’s relevant to our discussion but he looks at the parameters of human behaviour, various things you can do and be measured, and finds that the interesting thing about Western culture is that it is always at one end of the behavioural spectrum. So if you investigate one thousand cultures, whatever the parameter, we are either the most conservative or the most liberal, but never in the centre of the distribution.

TJ: Wow.

DW: And if it’s true it is such an incredible, important insight. He’s a fucking genius.

EP: Cut. That’s the end of my questions.

TJ: Those were great questions.

EP: Thank you.

DW: She’s very clever. If she were a bloke she’d be a genius.

EP: I’d be a big swinging dick. Or I’d have one, I don’t know. Speaking of being a genius, were you recording that? Because I forgot.

TJ: Oh dear.

DW: If you were a bloke you wouldn’t have forgotten.

TJ: You can remember all that, I’m sure. The strange thing is David probably does remember all that.

His sleepwalking pose and little boy PJs cue us for cuteness, so the craggy face is discomforting. He is stunted in stature, and stands not on a plinth, like a worthy sculpture in a gallery normally would, but on an ordinary table placed at a wildly sloping angle – with some salamis hanging from the front. I have no idea what the salamis are about, but I feel the pose, the altered body scale, and the wonky table, together convey the artist’s sense of helplessness and inadequacy in the face of art history. This interpretation is aided by the fact that Paul, who bears the face of his maker, is named for the performance artist Paul McCarthy, who I wrote about recently. When Paul was originally exhibited at Darren Knight Gallery in 2014, he was shown alongside similarly stunted figures in discombobulating poses, called Ray, Mike and Dave. According to my colleague, Mona curator Jarrod Rawlins, Ray is probably the artist Charles Ray, and Mike is Mike Kelley, who collaborated with McCarthy. Dave, it seems, is the astronaut from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Insecurity and unstable identity are recurring concerns of van Hout. (He returns to these themes ‘like a dog’ – for some reason this phrase, from the title of an exhibition by the British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, comes to my mind – ‘returns to its vomit’.) His body of work is populated by split, ambivalent manifestations of his ‘self’, as per the video Who goes there?, 2009, which shows van Hout repeatedly knocking on his front door and waiting for himself to answer. He obsessively depicts himself in altered form: as a sculpting dog or painting monkey; an Arctic explorer in crisis; dolls lined up in what might be coffins or display cases; or as a little boy in PJs (again), with one arm in a sling and the other stuck down his pants, a scowl on his adult face. His work has been described as ‘slacker art’: I don’t really know what that means but it seems to derive from the Richard Linklater film, called Slackers, that was seen to be a reaction to the hyper-materialism of the 1980s. A kind of meandering, lazy existentialism that to me seems inherently grotty and boyish, like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, slumping around the apartment making scathing, Shakespeare-referenced comments about Winona Ryder’s yuppie boyfriend. (Sigh.) There’s a distinctly Aussie-NZ edge to it, though (he’s from Christchurch). In the same show that the Mona curators picked Paul from, there is this video where van Hout reads lines from the disturbing 1998 film The Boys, playing both characters (originally David Wenham and Toni Collette) simultaneously. The deliberately dorky re-reading places the menacing tone of the dialogue at creepy-funny remove, and draws out that slight cultural cringe we still feel sometimes when we hear Australian accents on screen. And the video work I’ve Abandoned Me, 2004, shows two Ronnies, one regaling the audience with the woes of his career as an artist, the other standing still, seemingly petrified, watching Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Paul, 2014, Ronnie van Hout

Paul was moved recently in our gallery, to a kind of art-prison that intensifies the sense of suffocating artistic influence: in his new spot, he is hemmed in on all sides by other works, and by a display-cage that reminds me a little of the way Francis Bacon boxed in the anguished masculine subjects of his paintings. I asked Jarrod if this was the reason for the move, and he said, ‘Wow, you really are becoming a wanker.’ Apparently they needed to fill a space left by Berlinde De Bruyckere’s melancholic, elongated wax horse, and Paul fit perfectly. So in he was popped.

P XIII, 2008, by Berlinde De Bruyckere, is off display until our exhibition On the Origin of Art opens in November.

Later: Jarrod texted the artist about the salamis, and his reply was pleasingly circular: they ‘came with the sausage strings’ he ‘ordered from the States.’ He added: ‘I thought I’d add them as the “balls” of the table and a plumb bob showing the vertical.’ Roger that.

Jarrod also says (and he’s speculating now) that the snags might be a reference to McCarthy’s penchant to do weird and gross things with sausages, as in his performance works Hot Dog, 1974, Tubbing, 1975, or Heidi, with Mike Kelley, 1992. (I’m relieved I wasn’t a wanker enough to think of that on my own.)

Painter, 1995, by Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy, regularly tops our list of works most hated by Mona visitors. I have avoided writing about it for a long time, because that would entail sitting through the whole thing: fifty minutes of unpleasant muttering and groaning, thrashing wildly around with paint, pissing in pot plants and squeezing shit out of an oversized tube onto a canvas, topped off with a really (sorry to be a prude) distasteful bum-sniffing montage at the end.

Needless to say, I find it difficult too. I think it’s got some merit, though. For me, it’s the sheer weirdness of the thing, the angsty-funny, sex-fiend-in-a-clown-costume atmosphere it generates; and, on a more cerebral level, the way it exposes and exploits the myth of the male artistic genius.

So, obviously Painter is a parody of the process of making a painting. It comments specifically on the American ‘action painters’, also known as the abstract expressionists: the group of artists, led by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others, who came to prominence after World War II, shifting the centre of the artworld from Paris to New York. The title character in Painter (who is McCarthy himself of course) chants ‘de Kooning’ under his breath as he works, channeling his spirit, or trying to free himself from his daunting legacy. In contrast, the scene of the interview with the inert European collectors shows them mindlessly listing their trophy-buys. ‘What Rothko do you have?’ asks the dullest interviewer on earth. ‘A brown one,’ the male of the pair replies. ‘It’s red actually’ says his wife.

This kind of commercial cynicism is common to the artworld of course, but it juxtaposes especially sharply with the central objective of abstract expressionism, which is to externalise an authentic inner reality. Among diverse styles and techniques was the common goal to express an interior psychological state – delivered via the medium of movement as much as paint. Putting paint on the canvas was a kind of performance, and the resulting painting a document of an authentic moment in time. This was ripe for myth, in part because it taps into our intuitive feelings around art and authenticity: underneath our suspicion of the pretentions of ‘the artworld’, we like to imagine there is such a thing as submerged essence of genius, just waiting for release.

This collective fantasy took shape around the macho dudes of the movement. ‘If the women could see me now, oh boy…’ says McCarthy’s painter – but he’s less potent than pathetic, a child saddened and enraged by the unwillingness of the universe to revolve around himself. ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ he cries on repeat, in a way I find especially uncomfortable; he might mean painting, or life. The other major hallmarks of the action-painting myth are present as well, in his emotional volatility (sobbing and whining one moment, calling on God for inspiration another), physicality (hacking, pumping, jabbing maniacally at the canvas), and diva demands. ‘I want all the money right now,’ he shouts at his gallerist. ‘I want shows all over Europe, and I want big, big catalogues!’ ‘You’re acting like a spoilt child,’ she replies, ‘You’re going through a stage. All the artists who get famous go through this. You’re just a human being. Stop this ridiculous tantrum!’

This is self-parody, too, of course; McCarthy himself came to prominence in the 1990s, around the time Painter was made. The aesthetic of his work – sort of like a cross between a porn set and Disneyland, in which at any moment the characters will start rubbing themselves on each other or chopping off their rubber limbs – is a reflection on his sense of place, of the difficulties of making original and meaningful film and performance work alongside the Hollywood dream machine. His intention, too, to comment on mainstream American culture is shown in his trademark use of foodstuffs like ‘ketchup’ (as they call it), mayonnaise, and chocolate sauce (stand ins, he says, for blood, semen and poo). McCarthy has been using these foodstuffs in paintings and performances since the 1970s. This connects him to the Viennese Actionists of that time, the difference being (as McCarthy himself has made clear) that they were using real bodily fluids, and causing themselves real physical and psychic pain. McCarthy is more interested in buffoonery than trauma, I think, and yet a sense of trauma is, for me, most certainly conveyed.

In the process of writing this, I started to go down the rabbit hole of art history, and it occurred to me that I might be becoming a wanker. (That’s a nice mixed metaphor: wanking in a rabbit hole.) Claiming to like and ‘get’ difficult conceptual art is a marker of the ‘in’ group, as distinct from the taste and preference of ordinary people. This very discrepancy is part of what drives the trajectory of modern art history. Quentin Bell (following Thorstein Veblen) identified the phenomenon of ‘conspicuous outrage’: I have so much cultural capital, I can afford to flout ‘good’ taste. I decided to send my essay to David for feedback. Maybe I should have stuck to my initial reaction to Painter, and not worried about this artworld palaver. Here’s what I wrote in an earlier draft:

I don’t like Painter because: it looks kind of crappy, like a student porn film; the squeaky voice is annoying and creepy; nothing really happens; the painter character is sad and pathetic; the prosthetic noses freak me out; the bum sniffing at the end is really, really gross.

And another:

I feel anxious when I watch it, and sad, like being confronted with the inherent loneliness and ridiculousness of ‘the human condition’ (that old chestnut) – and I don’t agree, and even if I do on some days, I don’t want to be reminded of it. I don’t see that scraping the barrel of our doubt and insecurity just for the sake of it is valuable, nor that shattering taboos is inherently worthwhile. I sound like a thousand other ranters on the internet. I am getting old.

And finally:

Just so you know, this is not going to be one of those ‘she does like it, after all, because it shows her the underside of her own fears and desires’ or some such rubbish. I’m pretty sure I will still hate it after I’ve finished writing this, and that will be because it’s crap, not because of some character flaw of mine.

Works like Painter reflect, in part, a process by which the cool group selects the most outrageous art to represent it, pushing artists to invent more and more outrageous means to stay ahead of the curve. McCarthy knows this, and therein lies the strength of his work. But in the meantime, the work is still ugly and unlovable. It dares me to embrace my authentic response. The only reason I started to think more deeply about Painter, to try harder to like it, is that it has been sanctioned as ‘significant’ – by art history, and by the gallery that employs me. But then I did, truly, start to like it more. ‘Truly’. Is it really ever possible to approach a work of art in and of itself, without the surrounding social and cultural context? Art isn’t just sensory input, after all – patterns and colours and pretty shapes. It tells human stories, and humans are cultural and social – intensely so. Surely an ‘authentic’ response should embrace this as well?

David wrote back to confirm that yes, I was becoming a wanker. But he also added this:

My mother used to tell a story about World War II army rations. One wasn’t allowed to complain about the food; the penalty was to be assigned cheffing duties. A ‘chef’ attempted to get his duties reassigned. He cooked camel turd. One person exclaimed, ‘This tastes like shit,’ and then, collecting himself, continued, ‘but the servings are substantial.’

McCarthy’s marvellous parody has tension because he is biting the arse that feeds him. Art (and the art market) can be shit, indeed. But the servings are substantial.

Thanks, David, for summing up what I think I’m trying to say, and also for adding another metaphor to this overloaded essay. But mostly for letting me… um… bite the arse that feeds me… Oh Lord. I think I’m done.